** Featured as a Guardian Long Read ** '[A] fast-paced, myth busting expose' Max Blumenthal, author of The Management of Savagery 'Contentious... forceful... salutary' The New Yorker EVERYTHING WE HAVE BEEN TOLD ABOUT THE DEMOCRATIC NATURE OF THE INTERNET IS A MARKETING PLOY. As the Cambridge Analytica scandal has shown, private corporations consider it their right to use our data (and by extension, us) which ever way they see fit. Tempted by their appealing organisational and diagnostic tools, we have allowed private internet corporations access to the most intimate corners of our lives. But the internet was developed, from the outset, as a weapon. Looking at the hidden origins of many internet corporations and platforms, Levine shows that this is a function, not a bug of the online experience. Conceived as a surveillance tool by ARPA to control insurgents in the Vietnam War, the internet is now essential to our lives. This book investigates the troubling and unavoidable truth of its history and the unfathomable power of the corporations who now more or less own it. Without this book, your picture of contemporary society will be missing an essential piece of the puzzle. 'A masterful job of research and reporting about the military origins of the 'world wide web' and how its essential nature has not changed in the years since its creation during the Cold War.' - Tim Shorrock, author of Spies For Hire

The internet is the most effective weapon the government has ever built. In this fascinating book, investigative reporter Yasha Levine uncovers the secret origins of the internet, tracing it back to a Pentagon counterinsurgency surveillance project. A visionary intelligence officer, William Godel, realized that the key to winning the war in Vietnam was not outgunning the enemy, but using new information technology to understand their motives and anticipate their movements. This idea -- using computers to spy on people and groups perceived as a threat, both at home and abroad -- drove ARPA to develop the internet in the 1960s, and continues to be at the heart of the modern internet we all know and use today. As Levine shows, surveillance wasn't something that suddenly appeared on the internet; it was woven into the fabric of the technology. But this isn't just a story about the NSA or other domestic programs run by the government. As the book spins forward in time, Levine examines the private surveillance business that powers tech-industry giants like Google, Facebook, and Amazon, revealing how these companies spy on their users for profit, all while doing double duty as military and intelligence contractors. Levine shows that the military and Silicon Valley are effectively inseparable: a military-digital complex that permeates everything connected to the internet, even coopting and weaponizing the antigovernment privacy movement that sprang up in the wake of Edward Snowden. With deep research, skilled storytelling, and provocative arguments, Surveillance Valley will change the way you think about the news -- and the device on which you read it.